Wealth & Money Quote by Thomas More

The phrase lands like a tiny moral parable disguised as bookkeeping: money isn’t merely spent, it’s “wanton,” and it doesn’t empty the purse so much as scorch through it. More’s verb choice turns finance into arson. The “little” is a trap, too - the sort of minimization people use when they’re already rationalizing a vice. A small indulgence, he implies, can have an outsized consequence because the damage isn’t linear; it’s structural. Once the bottom is gone, everything else falls through.

The intent is sharply corrective. More writes from a Christian humanist world that treats economic life as a test of character, not a neutral arena of preference. “Wanton” in his era carries sexual and moral looseness, so the subtext is that reckless spending is kin to lust: appetite ungoverned by reason. It’s not an accident that the purse is personified as something vulnerable and bodily. The image shames without sermonizing; you can almost see the singed leather.

Context matters: early 16th-century England is a place where display, patronage, and courtly consumption are rising, while older moral frameworks insist that excess corrodes the soul and the household. More, who would later die for principle, had a lifelong suspicion of the ways private desires metastasize into public rot. This line suggests that “a little” corruption is still corruption - and that the first casualty is the container meant to hold you together.